For a United, Working Class Defense of Muslim Communities

Trump, his white nationalist advisers and their fascist supporters are openly attacking Muslim communities. Trump’s authoritarian ban on refugees from Syria and on travelers, immigrants, students and refugees from a total of seven majority Muslim nations is a direct assault on Muslim communities, immigrant communities, people of color and the entire working class. With Trump’s targeted assault from the top, fascists on the ground in Texas burned a Muslim Mosque. In Quebec City, Canada, a white fascist stormed into a mosque, killing six and wounding many more. The shooter was a known admirer of Trump, French far-Right leader Marine Le Pen and an assortment of other racist, anti-immigrant and white nationalist groups.

Opposition to Trump’s racist travel ban was immediate and broad. People in their thousands came into the streets and demonstrated against the ban at airports and in cities from New York to Detroit to Columbus to Chicago to LA to Seattle and dozens of cities/airports in between. Demonstrations continue and are multi-racial and multi-national, involving Muslims from many communities and with solidarity from Latinx communities, Black communities, immigrant communities and working people of all races and nationalities. Various liberal leaders and many with ties to the Democratic Party attempt to lead the demonstrations and be in charge, but the truth is that ordinary people, working people are coming out and building the opposition: young and old, women and men, Muslim and non-Muslim, Black, white, Latinx, Arab, Asian, all of us together opposing the ban and standing in defense of Muslim communities and immigrant communities.

Trump and his supporters are attacking very basic rights, and people are fighting to defend those rights: the right to worship, the right to be yourself, the right to travel, the right to be with family, the right to survive by fleeing war and bombing, the right to an education, the right to be safe. All of us, including anarchists and revolutionaries, should join in the fight to defend these basic rights and to oppose government and fascist attacks on these rights and on Muslim communities. Now we need community self-defense and united working class defense; the multi-racial and multi-national working classes must join our forces, must unite our forces in defense of Muslim communities.

We know that attacks on Muslims are part of the broader attacks on Latinx communities, immigrant communities, indigenous people, women, LGBTQ communities, people with disabilities, “cities,” prisoners, students and all of us. While Trump plans to follow through on his campaign promises of upsetting Washington politics – what he called “draining the swamp” – he is in fact working to realign politics and policies that will continue the broad attacks on working people. He hopes to keep working people focused on fighting each other; he hopes to keep everyday white folks focused on fighting to protect white supremacy and capitalism. Much of this is facilitated by promoting the facade of white nationalism, in which white identity and imperial borders actively define the excluded and the enemy, domestically and abroad. The specter of both the alien at home and possible war abroad work hand in hand in producing targets for racist and xenophobic violence.  This racist and authoritarian reaction has been at the center of Trump’s program from the beginning, and the attacks he has ushered in have made this painfully obvious. Millions of people voted for Trump seeing him as someone to “shake up the establishment”. But Trump’s program is another variant of rule by the bosses and billionaires, even if some of the ruling class is bothered by his seemingly chaotic approach. The dangers, as seen in the Mosque attacks, is that racist and fascist violence is being carried out from below, by everyday people. Working people are faced with the need to defend both against the attacks of the State and a racist and fascist base.

Anarchists and revolutionaries have been on the frontlines, but must continue to join the fight to oppose racism and discrimination and to build multi-racial, working class defense of all of our communities. Trump wants to take us back to American Apartheid. We are not going back. The liberals and the Democratic Party have no answers to Trump and the rise of a fascist movement. We are not going back to their failed policies and empty promises. The only way forward now is straight ahead, on our own, uniting our forces. No one is coming to save us; we have to do that ourselves. The whole system has to go.

NO BAN, NO WALL, NO BORDERS, NO STATES!